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Lee is a common surname in English-speaking countries.
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In the United States during the year 2000 census, "Lee" was the 22nd-most-common surname; although this conflates a number of unrelated surnames with the same spelling (see below).
Origins
There are several distinct origins of the Lee surname. The most common is derived from Old English lēah, meaning a meadow or forest clearing.
This developed variously into the surnames Lee, Lea, and Leigh. The Lees of Shropshire were notable as the forebears of the colonial American Lee family which produced Richard Henry Lee, Robert E. Lee, and Zachary Taylor.
Ireland
The name in Ireland has several diverse origins, resulting in widely dispersed clusters of the name in South Western, Western (Galway) and North Eastern Counties. One recognized root was the anglicization of the gaelic surname "Ó Laoidaigh" which resulted in a number of variants, such as Lee, Lea, and Leigh.
Other Lees have English roots and still others may have derived from the Norman "Du Lea". The 1901 Irish census list 4912 entries primarily in the counties of Galway, Dublin, Cork, Antrim, Limerick and Down.
East Asian
Lee is also the anglicized spelling of a number of East Asian surnames used by Chinese or Korean diaspora translating numerous surnames also romanized as Li, particularly the one deriving from the Chinese word for "plum" (李, pinyin Lǐ; S.Kor. 이, Lee; N.Kor. 리, Rhee; Vietnamese 李, quốc ngữ Lê, Lý or Lí) which is among the most common surnames in the world. In America, Lee is the most common surname for Chinese and Korean Americans and the second-most-common surname for Asian and Pacific Islanders, behind the Vietnamese Nguyen. Similarly, Lee is the third-most-common surname among Chinese Singaporeans.
Norway
Originating from Norway as "Lie," this surname was altered when it arrived in the Americas in the late 1800s to fit the English language's pronunciation.
Notable people
Places
A number of places in the US have been named for the various famous people named Lee: